Understanding streams and files

- [Voiceover] When we think of a file, we tend to think…of a block of data on some kind of media:…a hard drive or a memory card,…or some fixed physical media.…Most operating systems deal with a file…as a stream of data, rather than blocks of data.…This allows the system to buffer the data,…and to provide it to client processes in manageable chunks.…This also allows a system to treat…many different data sources in the same way.…So a stream may be data read from,…or written to a file in the file system,…the network, or even the screen and keyboard.…

In Perl, like most modern languages,…a file may be any number of things,…and Perl handles these various data sources…in similar ways, often indistinguishably so.…For the sake of simplicity,…all of these things are typically referred to as files.…While there are different things,…and they have different properties,…from the perspective of your code,…they work in pretty much the same way.…So I tend to use the term file to refer to them,…unless something more specific is required.…

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6/11/2016

Perl is a powerful and flexible scripting language that is uniquely suited to website development, system administration, and network programming. Perl 5 was originally released in 1994, and continues to evolve. The "Modern Perl" movement has embraced its mature syntax and reusable modules. Bill Weinman has designed this course to give the Perl student enough command of the language to write efficient and effective Perl scripts and maintain existing codebases.

Watch to learn the details of the Perl syntax, from variables, conditionals, loops, and data structures to regular expressions, functions, and references. A quick-start guide is included for experienced developers who want to get up and running with Perl 5 fast, and the entire course is recommended for both new and experienced programmers alike. Later chapters cover file handling and reusing code with Perl modules, plus Perl best coding practices.